Philip Benedict's fairly recent book has not received anywhere near the attention or accolades it deserves from Reformed Christians. This may say something about Benedict's tome, which in the form of almost 550 pages of fine print (plus another hundred of notes) almost works as a doorstop. But just as likely, it says more about Reformed Christians and their historical interest. Calvinists are not by any means hostile to history; among conservative Protestants they de-monstrate more attention to the past than most, and the reason has to do with the importance of the Reformation and the production of the Westminster Standards and the Three Forms of Unity. Because of their debt to the past, Presbyterians and Reformed grant the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a preponderance of authority that is unmatched among American evangelicals for whom history is usually a barrier to Jesus and the Bible.
Still, Calvinists' interest in history runs to the inspirational rather than the intellectual. If the past can vindicate Calvinism and provoke us to greater zeal through the examples of godly heroes, then it is useful. But if history only fills in the mental gaps by showing how much of what we take for granted was never so certain, that the arrival of our faith and practices was a long, arduous, and even inconclusive struggle-well, who needs that? One answer is that we all do because each and every day we experience such a struggle, and history lets us know our struggle is not alone.
The only real inspiration that Benedict provides is that of careful and judicious scholarship. A book that took almost fifteen years of his life, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed is a first-rate piece of history that, despite what the methods of social history might suggest to wary readers, is no excuse to employ the politics of identity to blame dead-white-European men for once being living-white-European men. The social aspects of Benedict's history allow the economic and political dynamics of Calvinism's development to receive valuable attention. But the author does not reduce the Reformed faith to race, class, gender, or political rivalry. In fact, what makes Benedict's book remarkable is his ability to treat Calvinism as first and foremost a religious phenomenon, an expression of Western Christianity that had its greatest impact upon church life and the ministry of pastors and the lives of church members. Because the church was part of the warp and woof of Western Europe, reforms in theology, ministry, and devotion would inevitably spill over into every arena of European society. Even so, Benedict shows that the Calvinism of the sixteenth century was not the neo-Calvinism of the twentieth century: Reformed Christians did not set out to apply their faith to every area of life because of a Calvinist world-and-life-view; instead, their intention was to reform the church, and that agenda had a direct bearing on economics, politics, and education. Still, the intention was first and foremost religious-cultural transformation was merely a by-product of church reform.
Benedict's narrative is straightforward even while reveling in the complexity of Reformed developments. He starts with the sixteenth century and contrasts the reforms spearheaded by Luther with those of Zwingli. John Calvin soon emerges center stage. Benedict does not discount the significance of Bullinger or other Reformed leaders, but he also explains how Geneva became the epicenter of Reformed Protestantism, thanks to the combination of Protestant refugees streaming to the city and the work of Calvin-who was one of the most diligent of churchmen, working indefatigably for the sake of the Geneva churches and providing counsel to the Reformed in a far-flung network that extended from Scotland to Poland and Lithuania. The second section is devoted to the expansion of Reformed churches across Europe throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Benedict follows refinements in Reformed theology, church life, and politics during the seventeenth century and examines deftly the controversies over Arminianism in the Netherlands, Amyraldianism among the French and Swiss Reformed, and the effects of British politics upon English and Scottish Calvinists. The concluding section is not at all what readers might expect from a social history-an exploration of Reformed piety through the lens of the ministry and discipline of Reformed pastors and elders, and the practices of families and the laity. No matter how weak the effort to follow the Reformed regimen of church and household piety, Benedict concludes that Calvinism "created a new set of sensibilities." "For all its internal variations, Reformed Europe possessed a distinctive religious culture that set it apart from Europe's other confessions and imparted a characteristic sensibility and range of experiences to those raised within it" (532).
From a social history, readers would expect interaction with the variety of interpretations that have attributed to Calvinism almost every feature of the modern world-from high rates of literacy and the Puritan work ethic to the scientific revolution and the triumph of democracy. Benedict does not neglect these questions but discounts the degree to which Calvinism can take credit for them. He concludes that most attempts to link advancements in the modern world to Calvinism "exaggerate" and "attribute them too simply to a single cause" (541). The rise of the modern West was a much more complicated affair than a Calvinist-induced break with feudal Christendom. Even so, Benedict regards the chief legacy of Reformed Protestantism in religious terms. He concludes that "it made a difference in people's life experience whether they were raised as Lutherans, Reformed, or Catholic….Each confession had its own set of styles of devotion. Each had its own doctrinal and psychological points of friction" (544).
The emergence of a Reformed identity, Benedict well shows, was not monolithic but depended greatly on local circumstances-hence the need for social history. Still, Calvinism was less a catalyst for modernization than a way of being a faithful follower of Christ. That conclusion may not inspire contemporary Calvinists to see the Reformation as a program of cultural renewal or to look for ways of taking every square inch captive for a Reformed world-and-life view. But it does offer the encouraging prospect, as Calvin well knew, that the affairs of this life are a "pilgrimage" on which God's people "are hastening toward the Heavenly Kingdom" (Institutes 3.x.1).
